The Carduan Chronicles is a nature study masquerading as science fiction, at least it is supposed to be. That leaves me creating the Carduan characters as science fiction to fit into real nature as the novel is set in an Ozark ravine and old, abandoned pasture with a creek.
However, the Carduan characters are pure imagination. I’m trying to create them as plausible beings from another planet. It’s a lot harder than I expected it to be.
First Consideration
Although an Ozark ravine can be fairly large, it isn’t large enough for a big space ship to land and remain unnoticed for long. That means the ship must be fairly small.
If the ship is small, the Carduans must be small as well. How big are they?
I went walking up several ravines in my area looking at what was there with a view of landing a ship there. Ravines flood so the landing spot must be up off the floor of the ravine.
The ravines have bluff rocks along them. The ship can land on one of these.
I ended up with a ship eighteen inches wide and high and thirty inches long. That left the Carduan characters at four inches tall.
Carduans
To arrive at what the Carduan characters look like, I had to decide on what their home planet Arkosa was like. My conjecture was a hot, dry planet bombarded by ultraviolet radiation. It became this way when a previous civilization destroyed their ozone layer. This destroyed that civilization and allowed these Arkosans to evolve.
Withstanding UV radiation requires several adaptations. One is a third eyelid to shield the eye from intense light. They can see UV light. Another adaptation is skin color. Blue pigments convert UV into harmless wavelengths.
Small size limits hand size, especially digits like fingers. The Carduans have three digits giving them a number system based on six, not ten.
Their background is somewhat like that of a praying mantis making them upright and agile. They are also strong, quick and aggressive in defense. It gives them a strongly matriarchal society that is in the process of changing as males are now long lived like the females, but still smaller.
Perhaps I am now ready to sketch what I think a Carduan looks like. And that makes writing The Carduan Chronicles easier.